


intensely creamy

by vvelna



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 20:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16125782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvelna/pseuds/vvelna
Summary: Dan and Phil are menaces to society, or at least to a beleaguered Tesco employee named Marlena.





	intensely creamy

**Author's Note:**

> another bingo fic. this one is for the prompt "twitter" and was inspired by this [ phil tweet ](https://twitter.com/AmazingPhil/status/23933827388)

Marlena reluctantly left the break room and headed back out onto the sales floor. There were four hours left in her shift. Actually, three hours and fifty-six minutes, not that she was counting. She picked up a trolley of customer returns and last minute castoffs from the front end, and headed off to put everything back on the shelves.

After returning a family of avocados to their home, Marlena turned around and saw two Fall Out Boy rejects at the far end of the produce aisle. One of them was cowering behind his hands while the other was rooting around in the lettuces. There was an air of “we’re burying a body” about them. She considered approaching them, but she really couldn’t be bothered to deal with any bullshit from customers just then.

So she waited around the corner, just out of sight, until they scurried away. She could’ve just kept walking, got on with her returns. But she had to check. People left food in all kinds of random places when they suddenly decided they didn’t want it. The other day she’d found a package of raw beef on a shelf in the cereal aisle, and during one unforgettable shift, she’d been jump scared by a whole frozen lobster lurking behind a jug of almond milk. She left her trolley near the end of the aisle and went to investigate.

It was like someone had detonated a bomb with yogurt shrapnel. There were great globs of it smeared all over the floor. It looked like somebody had tried to wipe a bit of it up, but just made it even worse by spreading it to a wider area. It blended in with the white floor enough that if she’d taken just one more step without looking down, she’d have probably slipped and broken her back. What absolute fucking twats.

In amongst the heads of lettuce, Marlena found the bodies—four smashed tubs of “intensely creamy” yogurt. Their plastic shells were weeping what remained of their contents onto crisp green leaves.

It was the kind of thing children did. Break something, then instead of owning up to it, try to hide it. They could’ve just alerted someone to the mess. She wanted to search the store for them and drag them by their floppy fringes back to the scene of the crime. Suffocate them in the lettuces, perhaps, or make them lick the yogurt off the floor.

Instead, she fetched a mop and bucket and a CAUTION: WET FLOOR sign. When the mess was taken care off, she aggressively wheeled her way back to the front end, peering down every aisle she passed. There was no sign of the little shits.

Marlena didn’t see them again until her anger had cooled into annoyance, about thirty minutes later. She’d finished off the returns and was headed to see what exciting task awaited her next, and there they were, waiting in line with a giant box of cereal and about five bottles of Ribena.

Of course Marlena couldn’t say anything to them, or to anyone else in front of them, but the second they left, she was going zip over to the cashier who was ringing them up and tell her all about it. The girl, Amber, had just started working that week, and talking shit about customers was traditionally how retail workers bonded.

The boys paid for their purchase and headed toward the exit. The one with the black hair tried to leave through the entrance door, nearly colliding with a man coming in. The brown-haired one grabbed his shoulders and gently guided him toward the exit. They were both laughing, and the black-haired one seemed to reach for the other’s hand, but missed and didn’t try again.

Amber didn’t have a line, so Marlena hurried over to her.

“You know those two guys you just rang up?”

“Yes! _Such_ a cute couple.”

“Well, they—wait. What makes you think they were a couple?”

Amber rolled her eyes and smiled. “It was _so_ obvious. They were so giggly and all up in each other’s space, and then they had a little tiff about the cereal like some gross, old married couple. They sort of reminded me of my girlfriend and me, honestly.”

Marlena still desperately needed to get the yogurt story off her chest, but she didn’t want to ruin anything for Amber. A customer approached, so she smiled and walked away. She went in search of someone else to complain to, and found Cynthia, a cantankerous older cashier who hated almost every customer who set foot in the store.

When Marlena told the story, she didn’t bring up Amber’s insight. She didn’t want Cynthia to think that their possible relationship was why she was pissed off, because it wasn’t. And she didn’t want Cynthia to make any sort of disparaging comment about anything other than the insolent nature of today’s youth.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> [ reblog/like on tumblr ](https://velvetnautilus.tumblr.com/private/178555066655/tumblr_pfsh3rKwFW1wm9q5f)


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